Creating Prehistory by Adam Stout

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The history of an academic discipline might seem like esoteric navel gazing, but Stout offers us an accessible and engaging account. It tells a much wider story of the way in which “establishment” power operates – archaeology was a new “science” but it was born of, and in some ways also gave birth to, its own “old boys network”. (There were one or two women who had significant influence but for the most part it was a “boys” network...).

Marcus Brigstocke in the spoof “We Are History” at one point asks how we know some fact, and answers his own question “Well I know because I am a Historian, and you know because I told you”. A moment when the jest speaks significant truth – much of Stout's account is about the struggles over who was entitled to claim authority over the truth of the past. While archaeology can identify and describe past material with increasing precision we should not forget that the meaning attached to that material remains contingent.

Contemporary narratives are projected back onto the past, Stout shows that in the age of Empire archaeologists “saw” evidence of the civilised Romans “improving” the lives of primitive Britons (just they “saw” in their own day civilised Britons improving the lives of the primitive natives in various corners of the world). For much of the period there was confidence in progress, but as one writer, Sir John Squire, in a review in 1936 noted that “We used to think that, at any rate, that sort of thing would not happen again; that wars of extermination, enslavement of populations, killings of prisoners, burning of cities, relapses into barbarism, and 'dark ages', would never recur in a mapped and limited globe, full of petrol and printing presses. It doesn't seem so certain now.”

As so now we are more likely to look at our distance pastoral ancestors and hold them up as models for an ecologically balanced future. When we hold up the past as a mirror do we only see ourselves? Or at least the selves we wish to be?

As well as telling us of those who founded the discipline Stout also tells us of some of those were excluded from the fold. We find that often such exclusion was as much due to poor social connections as it was of any particular merit or lack in their intellectual ideas. Using Stonehenge and the Druids as examples – the confrontation between the archaeologists and the druids can not be simply boiled down to a conflict over the “facts”. While with the ley-line hunters the issue was perhaps one of over interpreting correlations and seeing false causation and yet how much of our academically creditable explanations actually rest of similar associations – every time something is explained as “ritual”?

Desire Line by Gee Williams

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First a big spoiler alert – there are some big twists in the narrative therefore you might not want to know what happens before you have read it...

This novel plays on the contrast between two places, Oxford and Rhyl (known in our house as “more cosmopolitan Rhyl” a phrase we picked up some years ago from some TV programme or other...). There is intellectual Oxford and earthy Rhyl, and Yori, with a grandparent from each of them, is pulled between these two characteristics.

In the first part of the novel you assume that Yori is a contemporary of Sara, whose body is washed up during a storm which floods Rhyl. You learn about Sara's disappearance as if it might have happened days before the flood – but then in the second part it is revealed that there has been an interval of 30 years (the flood is in 2040) between the two. And then learn that Yori is not a contemporary stranger of her but in fact Sara's grandson. But it is half way through the novels 400 pages that you get to this – and it causes considerable confusion, I did go back and check that I hadn't missed something obvious in the first part to establish the relationships (of time, and of family) between the different parts of the narrative – but no I think the confusion was deliberate.

Sara is the strong character of the first half of the novel – and her shadow and absence are still felt in the second half – she is the flawed genius, perhaps not a particular new character, but a skilfully crafted one. She is also an alcoholic and I think her behaviours around alcohol are really authentic - the little tricks of the trade by which she is able to weave additional drinks “unnoticed” into her day are familiar. This was not comfortable, in the same way that the book Kicking the Black Mamba was not comfortable, too close to home – and the fact that both the real Egan and the fictional Sara end up drowning plays on my mind.

The closeness I felt to Sara did leave the second half of the novel feeling a bit flat – but it was about those still wrestling with her absence decades later and so that flatness was, to over use a word, “authentic”. There are lots of “true stories” told that don't speak half the truth of this book.

Fairer Sex by Richard S Briggs

It can be ordered direct from Grove 

A Grove Booklet, so under 30 pages.

It is welcome to have opportunities such as this to engage with the “Bibical” stories about the relationships between men and women without feeling it loaded with the pressure of current divisions within the Church. Briggs is offering a way to engage rather than trying to define the exact answers that come from that engagement.

Briggs has a chatty style, peppering his summaries of the stories with contemporary asides. You will properly find this either refreshing or intensely irritating.

From his conclusion, he draws three key points;

The first is the importance of hermeneutics, “learning to think scripturally”, and that “one need not claim to have uncovered the one true reading of a text in order to have offered a coherent and compelling perspective that may be of spiritual benefit.”

The second is that the Bible has things to say about sex, but that “...Bible reading is just one of the key components of wisdom. Self-awareness, humility, alertness to the ways in which sex can be fun, or frustrating, or ridiculous, or delightful – all these contribute to shaping readers who may discern what to look for in their reading of the relevant texts.”

And third, “is the art of loving the text not so far removed from loving another person? A loving reader takes time to listen, reflect, and engage respectfully.”

Taken together these would leave us to being both biblical and compassionate people – things which too often are painted as being mutually exclusive within the Church today.